Donna Brazile: Ignore Tea Party at Your Peril

Donna Brazile, the Democrat strategist who ran Al Gore’s campaign, said Republican candidates who ignore the Tea Party do so at their peril, as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) shocking ouster proved.

“The Tea Party is still highly caffeinated,” she said on ABC’s This Week, acknowledging that the “Tea Party is the energy inside the Republican Party.”

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Brazile said that Cantor ignored Tea Party conservatives who also rose up in part to protest George W. Bush’s expansion of the federal government, and he paid for it with his political career.

“You ignore them, you ignore the base and that’s a problem,” Brazile said. “And he ignored the base.”

As Breitbart News has reported, only after Brat started hammering Cantor on amnesty did his broader message tying Cantor to crony capitalism resonate. The pro-free markets and anti-crony capitalism message that resonates with voters fed up with Washington’s bipartisan permanent political class is one that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been hammering for years and throughout her political career, as she did in a landmark 2011 speech in Iowa. The political establishment is finally hearing it.